Homo faber faber

St Peter’s Colonnade is Bernini’s: we say so without hesitation. It bears his name, yet its physical construction was the work of a vast workshop of craftsmen under his direction. The work is his all the same, because the author is not the one who moves the hands: it is the one who had the idea and followed its making and its placing step by step.

The image of the workshop is mine; the key to reading it I take from the philosopher Luciano Floridi. In the reading Luciano Floridi proposes, the point is not to attribute a human mind to the machine, but to observe that it can produce effects and actions without possessing our own way of thinking. Put my way: it does not replace the mind, it replaces the arm.

It is the new workshop, the tireless apprentices who turn your creation into matter and leave you the space, the time and the energy to think, experiment and create again. The good master and artist does not go missing: he watches over, checks and directs the work of his workshop. Only in this way, in the end, can the matter bear his name.

This has always been the distinguishing trait of our species. Freely borrowing an idea from Henri Bergson, before we are Homo sapiens we are Homo faber: the human being who, to extend his own strength and skill, makes tools and uses them with expertise. To go from the flint of the first blade to the silicon of the chips that drive AI took two million years of evolution, but in the end what changed, and changed a great deal, was the form, not the ingredients of the substance: thought and sand.

Who knows whether that first man who shaped a tool from stone was opposed by his group or imitated. I hazard an answer on instinct: the second. When we are told over and over that machines will make us smaller, I smile, because the opposite will happen. The more the machine takes over execution, the more value moves upwards, towards what remains ours: imagining, deciding, giving meaning, in a word Creating. Every tool that has extended our skill has pushed us to face new limits and new challenges.

AI is the latest, immensely powerful implement humankind has invented, and it carries within it an even more powerful condition: it does not reward those who only know how to ask, it rewards those who know how to judge the answer. It multiplies those who are prepared and have an idea; it unmasks those who are not.

Here our country holds a card that has always been one of our riches: the know-how of manufacturing, and the taste, creativity and enterprise that no algorithm can replicate. Craftsmanship, which some led us to believe was backwardness, becomes an advantage again in the age of applied, functional AI.

One example above all is being set by Brunello Cucinelli. A man who has always believed in the workshop, to the point of turning an entire village, Solomeo, into a school for the crafts of the hand, has called artificial intelligence a “new handmaid for mankind”. I read it this way: a presence in the service of human genius, not its substitute.

We classify ourselves as Homo sapiens sapiens, the doubly wise human. But perhaps we are climbing another step: from Homo faber to Homo faber faber, the human who makes tools that are themselves able to make. No delusion of omnipotence or demiurgic pretension, but no demonisation or prejudice either: it is the latest model of flint, so let’s use it well, and to be free to create.

The moral? Let’s remember that even the sharpest stone needs skilled hands and ideas, and those cannot be delegated to anyone, least of all to the stone itself.